SENILITY
Gretchen Fletcher

For those who have sipped from Lethe
before being ferried across the Styx
forgetfulness must be sweet. No longer
do they have to shore up the banks
of memory as the waters roll by
eroding meaning from the mind.
They're allowed to let it all just slip
and slide into a muddied mess of half-
remembered words and their complexities
of meanings - denotations and all
those subtleties of connotations.
Without meaning, words become
no more than vowels and consonants
as the senile mind returns by degrees
to the tabula rasa it once was.